Philosophers in every known culture have debated the nature of reality from time immemorial. While we cannot, in the nature of things, ever pin it down, we cannot give up the search: understanding, like reality itself, is an unending process, not a thing that is finished so as to be grasped. It is the process that offers to enlighten us, not the act of appropriation. ‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work’, goes one rabbinical saying, ‘but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.’92 The truly foundational aspects of our experience – starting with consciousness itself – belong
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